Posts Tagged ‘Gang of Eight’

As a member of the Senate Government Reform Committee in 1997, Durbin helped deflect the well-substantiated allegations that the Bill Clinton White House and the Democratic National Committee had received campaign contributions from Communist China to influence the ’96 elections. In 1998-99, Durbin was one of Mr. Clinton’s most ardent and effective defenders during the president’s impeachment proceedings.

In the aftermath of the Clinton administration, Durbin consistently provided vocal opposition to the presidency of George W. Bush. Notwithstanding the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2004 report blasting the CIA—and absolving the Bush White House of any blame—for its inaccurate pre-war judgments about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Durbin maintained that senior Bush administration officials “should have been more diligent in challenging the validity of analytical assumptions and the adequacy of intelligence collection and reporting.”

2. Slimy politicizer and terrorist sympathizer

In 2004 Durbin took advantage of the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal to capitalize politically, introducing legislation to reaffirm the U.S. ban on torture and grilling White House counsel Alberto Gonzales on the issue during the latter’s confirmation hearings to be Attorney General. Durbin accused Gonzales of having fabricated legal loopholes that (a) “narrowly redefined torture,” (b) “ignored the rule of law and the demands of human decency,” and (c) “created the permissive environment that made Abu Ghraib possible.”

Durbin also called for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention center, where Islamic terrorists and enemy combatants were being held. In a June 14, 2005 speech on the Senate floor, Durbin read from an FBI report which claimed that detainees were sometimes held in rooms where the temperatures were either too cold or too hot, and where loud rap music was being played. He then said: “If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime—Pol Pot or others—that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.”

Though Durbin’s remarks were subsequently exploited for propaganda purposes by anti-American organizations like Al-Jazeera and others, the senator initially refused to express remorse for his comments. On June 22, however, the treasonous SOB issued a tearful apology from the Senate floor to anyone who might “believe that my remarks crossed the line.” “I’m sorry,” he stated, “if anything that I said caused any offense or pain …”

3. Insider trading

On September 18, 2008, Durbin participated in a closed-door meeting with then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who briefed Durbin and other congressional leaders on the gravity of the financial crisis that was beginning to hit the American economy. The next day, Durbin sold off $42,696 in mutual-fund shares; before the end of the month, he had sold off another $73,000 in shares. Then the stock market collapsed. By October 17, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had plunged by 22%.

4. Hypocrite

Critics characterized Durbin’s sell-off as an act of hypocrisy, since he had previously complained that people who engaged in insider trading generally did not face sufficiently severe criminal penalties.

6. Sex-card player

Durbin again sparked controversy in during the July 2009 Senate confirmation hearings for President Barack Obama‘s nominee to the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, a woman of Puerto Rican heritage. The senator told reporters that in confirmation hearings of previous years: “When we [Democrats] asked questions of the white male nominees of a Republican president, we were basically trying to … make sure that they would go far enough in understanding the plight of minorities, because clearly that was not in their DNA.”

In 2012 Durbin served as a national co-chair of Barack Obama‘s presidential re-election campaign.

7. Buyer of votes from Hispanic immigrants

In 2013 Durbin was a key member of the so-called “Gang of Eight”—four Democrat and four Republican U.S. senators—who tried to pass a sweeping, 844-page immigration-reform bill aimed at giving provisional legal status to at least 11 million illegal immigrants and placing them on a path-to-citizenship. The other Democrats on the panel were Charles Schumer, Robert Menendez, and Michael Bennet. A Politico.com analysis noted that their proposal, if passed, “would transform the nation’s political landscape” by “pumping as many as 11 million new Hispanic voters into the electorate a decade from now in ways that … would produce an electoral bonanza for Democrats and cripple Republican prospects in many states they now win easily.”

In October 2014 the Chicago Tribune reported that Durbin’s wife, Loretta, was an Illinois-based lobbyist whose clients had benefited from numerous federal earmarks and grants as a direct result of the senator’s intercession. The Tribune, for example, cited instances of “[Mrs. Durbin’s] firm getting a one-year contract with a housing nonprofit group around the time the senator went to bat for the organization and others like it; a state university receiving funds earmarked by [Senator] Durbin when his wife was its lobbyist; and [Senator] Durbin arranging federal money for a public health nonprofit when his wife was seeking state support for the same group.”

Also in October 2014, Durbin said that Voter ID laws “significantly suppress and discourage” many people—especially “elderly, disabled, minority, young, rural, and low income” Americans—“from exercising their constitutionally protected right to vote.” Moreover, he claimed that such laws are unnecessary because “voter impersonation fraud is virtually non-existent.”

On February 26, 2015, Durbin praised the “courage” that President Obama had recently demonstrated by issuing executive orders to prevent the deportation of millions of illegal immigrants. He likened Obama’s bravery to that which had once enabled Abraham Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation as means of rectifying a “fatally flawed” U.S. Constitution. Durbin went on to criticize Republicans for obstinately standing in the way of racial progress with extended remarks.

8. Race-card player

In March 2015, Durbin blasted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for not allowing a Senate confirmation vote on attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch until a stalemate on abortion language in a human-trafficking bill could be resolved. Accusing the Republicans of racism, Durbin said: “Loretta Lynch, the first African-American woman nominated to be attorney general, is asked to sit in the back of the bus when it comes to the Senate calendar.”

9. Buyer of votes from Muslim ‘refugees’

In May 2015, Durbin was one of 14 Democratic senators who wrote a letter to President Obama urging him to “dramatically increase”—to at least 65,000—the number of refugees from war-torn Syria who would be resettled into American cities and towns. Additional signatories included Sherrod Brown, Chris Coons, Dianne Feinstein, Al Franken, Mazie Hirono, Tim Kaine, Amy Klobuchar, Patrick Leahy, Ed Markey, Robert Menendez, Patty Murray, Jeanne Shaheen, and Sheldon Whitehouse. Later, he asked for 100,000 Syrian refugees: “What the administration has posed is modest: 10,000. Too modest! As far as I am concerned, I believe we should be prepared to accept 100,000 — 100,000 Syrian refugees.”

10. Supporter of terrorist Iran, annihilator of Israel

In July 2015, Durbin was an enthusiastic supporter, part of a group of bribed CONgress persons, of the nuclear deal that the Obama administration negotiated with Iran—an agreement allowing the Islamist regime in Tehran to enrich uranium, build advanced centrifuges, purchase ballistic missiles, fund terrorism with $150 billions.

11. Supporter of criminals

Durbin supports criminals while neglecting the safety of American citizens, as he refuses to support Kate’s Law, initiated by Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), is named after Kate Steinle, who died on July 1, 2015 after being shot on Pier 14 in San Francisco by Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, a repeat felon and an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who had been deported 5 times. It would have been 6, except authorities in San Francisco wanted him on a drug-related warrant.

Durbin consistently shows that personal gains and ensuring his reelection with expanded voter base, Hispanic in this case, is all that matter to him.